Lorber Films Releases The Juche Idea, On May 27 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives
New York, NY – May 20, 2010 – Lorber Films is proud to announce the acquisition, as well as the New York premiere, of the feature film The Juche Idea (2008), by writer/director Jim Finn.
Winner of the Best Narrative Feature award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, The Juche Idea is set to start a one-week theatrical run, from May 27 to June 2, at New York’s Anthology Film Archives.
Best known for his “utopian comedies,” Mr. Finn has devoted himself to recreating the visual texture of various communist societies: Soviet Russia, the Maoist Shining Path guerilla movement in Peru, and the North Korean state.
Mr. Finn’s feature debut Interkosmos (71 minutes, 2006) focused on a fictional East German space colonization mission. His follow-up effort, La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (60 minutes, 2007), tracks a day in the life of a Shining Path (Peru’s Communist Party) women’s prison cellblock. La Trinchera was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the Top 10 experimental films of 2007.
Anthology Film Archives is showcasing these previous works, together with The Juche Idea and several of his short films, during the same week as part of their series Utopian Comedies: The Films of Jim Finn.
After the New York premiere, Lorber Films is planning to bring Finn’s The Juche Idea to other select art-house markets during the fall of 2010, before releasing the film on DVD and Blu-ray early next year.
In the late 1960s, Kim Jong Il guaranteed his succession as the Dear Leader of North Korea by adapting his father’s Juche (pronounced choo-CHAY) philosophy to propaganda, film and art. Translated as self-reliance, Juche is a hybrid of Confucian and authoritarian Stalinist pseudo-socialism.
Finn’s feature film is about a South Korean video artist who comes to a North Korean art residency to help bring Juche cinema into the 21st century. Inspired by the real-life story of the South Korean director kidnapped in the 70s to invigorate the North Korean film industry, the film follows Yoon Jung Lee, a young video artist invited to work at a Juche art residency on a North Korean collective farm.
The story is told through the films she made at the residency as well as interviews with a Bulgarian filmmaker and even a brief sci-fi movie.
The Juche Idea joins several other already-celebrated Kino Lorber titles that deal with North-Korean history, culture and politics. They include the recently acquired The Red Chapel (2010), winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize, about a fake Danish theatre duo, named The Red Chapel, that enters North Korea with their own agenda; the recently released documentary Kimjongilia (2009), by filmmaker NC Heiken; and the two docs by Daniel Gordon: A State of Mind (2004) and Crossing the Line (2007).
